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Making a case for books
By Carlton Samarajiwa
"Of making many books there is no end," Ecclesiastes complained. That was several millennia before Gutenberg, who in 1445 published the Gutenberg Bible. It was a giant leap for mankind, for ever since then the printing of books has grown in quantity and quality and through books the world's intelligence has grown.

This is one of several thoughts that crossed my mind as I kept walking from stall to stall and climbed the stairs and kept standing until my feet ached and my calves went numb at the Sixth International Book Fair at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall.

There were thousands upon thousands of books on every conceivable subject in 297 stalls run by both local and foreign publishers. The whole experience boggled the imagination. The sight of the throng, eager for knowledge, was equally mind-boggling; they concentrated all their attention on the books. Children, teen-agers, adults and old people, and certainly more women than men, gazed in rapture at the wide display of the written word. All these people were united by one mission -the thirst for knowledge. This was evidence, if any were needed, of the high literacy rate of Sri Lanka, which is among the top in Asia and of the continuing respect for the knowledge that resides within the covers of a good book -"the precious lifeblood of a master spirit".

The price of books today, however, makes a book-lover wince. And, my thoughts went back to my youth, when on pay day, I walked into the Kandy Lake House Bookshop and spent a mere Rs 10 or 20 on books, and bought as many as I did with the thousands of rupees I was able to spare at the 2004 Book Fair. A Penguin or a Pelican then cost as little as 80 cents and the larger editions not more than Rs 1.80 or Rs 2.40, the most. Leonard Woolf's Diaries for Rs 10, Ediriwira Sarachchandra's The Folk Drama of Ceylon for Rs 10, Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of Ceylon for Rs 10, Ceylon by Phillipus Baldaeus for Rs 10, The Revolt in the Temple for Rs 1.50 -these are a few of the treasures that stare at me from my DIY bookshelves. Such were some of the books that could be had for as low a price as Rs 10, which, however, at that time was a lot of money.

I thought also of my dear friend and fellow teacher Douglas Goonesinghe, who was collecting his ship fare from Colombo to Tilbury of Rs 750 in 1956 to seek his fortune in England? He gave me a six-foot by three packing case full of books and asked for Rs 300. Today, that collection is worth over Rs 30,000 (at a conservative estimate).

Anyway, notwithstanding today's high book prices, not to speak of the high cost of everything else, the sight of such large numbers of book-lovers sparing the money and the time to buy books is a sign of culture and civilization. No carnival, no pop music show, no political rally and no ODI could bring so many people together as this Book Fair did from September 6 - 12. At the first such Fair held in 1999 there were only 34 stalls; the number rose to 279 this year. There are more and more book publishers too in the country. This Book Fair, like the ones that will follow year after year, belies the prediction that books as we know them are on the way out as e-books become the "in" thing "on line". Futurologist Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who significantly declared the Book Fair open, wrote in an Asiaweek article some years ago:

"When the press was invented and the life-long labour of patient scribes could be replicated in minutes, some far-sighted monk lamented, 'I can see the day when there will be hundred -perhaps, even thousands of books! How could one possible read them all?'

No one ever did of course - and it may not be long before reading itself is a lost art. A simpler and much older method of communication will allow dumb humans to interact with smart machines. Thousands of icons ("cyberglyphs") will have made literacy an unnecessary skill, except, alas, for lawyers."

Where does one keep all these books in one's home? They take up a lot of space. C. S. Lewis recalls his childhood home in his Surprised by Joy:"My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books emphatically not. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.

A book-lover also has to be vigilant about borrowers and silver fish and other insects that burrow through the books from cover to cover, leaving a trail of destruction. Regi Siriwardena's "Report from the Front", sprang to mind; it records his sense of defeat when he discovered that termites had destroyed his cherished books:

The subversives have come out, secretly, silently,
After their long waiting underground.
Already, they'd made their first, destructive
strike in the dark,
Before I found the tell-tale mark in the corner
between two walls - a long, brown
streak,
which gave the show away.
Sure enough, in a book case ,
Down under the bottom row, I uncovered
a swarming mass of infiltrators.

A spray gun spat 'chus-chus', and several hundreds of wreckers laydead.
I counted my losses -Steiner
("After Babel') partly gone, still,
no serious damage. My sister, however,
(a seasoned general;) warned,
'You will have to be vigilant.' A day passed,
two; on the third day, they struck again;
were repulsed; this time they got
a couple of volumes of Mark Twain.
The war goes on. No negotiations
are possible.

Of course, I'd like to howl
from the housetops. 'Culture, civilisation
threatened! Anarchy! Murder most foul!'
But the small voice of a termite whispers:
'Comrades, there's a bloated capitalist who keeps shelves of food for himself, while we starve. Come, let us get it while he sleeps!"
A final observation, though I may be wrong: I did not see a single politician of any hue at this great Book Fair. Maybe, they have no time for knowledge, only for power. But the old saying goes, "Knowledge is power."

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